Oilers still counting on a one-man fire department
They were supposed to be Stanley Cup contenders this year, but that was before many of the Edmonton Oilers left Connor McDavid to put out all the fires
You can’t see the pillars of smoke as you fly into Edmonton, but you know there are fires burning. The Oilers were magically fixed last season, what with Connor McDavid smashing through the possibilities of how a human can skate, with Leon Draisaitl along as a potent sidecar, for a team that reached Game 7 of the second round. Edmonton was given the second-best odds of any team to win the Stanley Cup this year. In related news, kids: Don’t gamble.
And now the only teams with worse records than Edmonton are the Buffalo Sabres and the Arizona Coyotes, who were up 2-1 and hit two crossbars in overtime here Tuesday night before Edmonton came back to win. So, yes, fires.
“I just think it’s been a frustrating year for us, it’s been frustrating for every player in this room,” winger Pat Maroon said. “So we’ve got to find ways to get out of it. To get out of slumps you’ve got to bring swagger, you’ve got to bring intensity, you’ve got to grind it out, you’ve got to find ways to help your linemates. You can’t just rely on one player every year. You can’t wait for him to do it. Someone else has got to do it.”
Maroon is a big honest man, and he’s right. When Edmonton landed McDavid there was a great cry of karmic anger across the land, since the franchise’s incompetence seemed as majestic and enduring as the Rocky Mountains themselves. And yet they were rewarded. And after spending one year breaking his collarbone, McDavid dragged them back to the playoffs last season. The McJesus nickname was only partly hyperbole.
Now the Oilers have won back-to-back games for the second time this season going into Thursday’s game against the Toronto Maple Leafs, and let’s go over the last couple weeks . . .
Former Oilers Jordan Eberle and Taylor Hall talked about how the Edmonton media was super mean and sunk their confidence, with Eberle telling Tim Panaccio for Sportsnet, “When you read articles every day about how much you suck, it’s tough.” Fact check: probably true.
Head coach Todd McLellan had to clarify that, when he said of centre Leon Draisaitl “Leon skates, but a lot of the time he skates for Leon,” he was not trying to say his second-best player was selfish.
McLellan and general manager Peter Chiarelli seemed to disagree over just how fast or slow the team is.
Chiarelli came out and called the team’s struggles “a little bit of a death by a thousand cuts.” He variously named scoring, defending, special teams, and also said the word “goaltending” a lot, which was a bit of a tell.
Meanwhile, the team continues to hang every available ornament onto the McDavid Christmas tree — he was playing with Milan Lucic and Mike Cammalleri as recently as Tuesday night; by Wednesday, Cammalleri was a healthy scratch, and Jesse Puljujarvi, who has 10 points in 36 career games since being drafted two years ago, was on the top line. Even Jesus only brought one man back from the dead.
“I’ve definitely played with lots of different players, and it doesn’t really matter,” McDavid said. “I’d obviously like to find chemistry with someone, but that’s how it’s been. Everyone’s been playing with everyone. Obviously you’d like to stick with a line for games in a row, but it hasn’t worked out that way.”
Of course, Edmonton’s lines were in danger of being juggled again, since goaltender Cam Talbot, who has been unreliable this season after playing eleventy-million games last year, was being evaluated Wednesday for an upper-body injury. Ah.
“We know what we’re capable of, and we have — well, we should still have the confidence in ourselves, because I mean, we show it here and there,” centre Ryan Nugent-Hopkins said. “We just need to find it consistently.”
“In this game, confidence is so huge, and personally, when things don’t go well, it’s tough to get that confidence back. And when a team isn’t doing well, it’s even tougher to break out of that. And team-wise, it’s the same thing. You struggle a little bit, lose a few in a row, it’s tough to get out of that. But we’re getting better at that now.”
Maybe, though maybe it’s also too late. The cynical view of the Oilers has been that the Hall trade, and the Eberle trade, and the Lucic signing, and the Kris Russell signing, and the contract for Draisaitl were all misses. The super cynical view of the Oilers is that once McDavid’s contract kicks in, he will be trapped on a team that relies too much on his brilliance to be anything great. And some Leafs fans, jealous of the Oilers having McDavid even while mooning over Auston Matthews, might find this hilarious.
But now and forever, Leafs fans should take the high road. Just because Toronto’s young team and superstar isn’t drowning in drama, and just because it hasn’t yet seen its future cap weighed down by anchors, and just because it doesn’t have veterans pleading that it can’t be a one-man operation . . . well, all it means is that Leafs fans are being seen an alternative path for their young team, if things go wrong, and should simply be grateful that it’s happening, for now, to somebody else.